I TAUGHT philosophy to students for 26 years at UG. One of the philosophers that was a recurring name on the course outline was Arthur Koestler (Koestler did not study philosophy at the university level). In describing the innate flaws of Homo Sapiens that make humans far more dangerous than lower animals, Koestler argued with a passion that life will forever be violent because an evolutionary line fault in the cerebral structure of Homo Sapiens makes their inclination to violence indissoluble.

Koestler may have been influenced by one of the 18th century great philosophers, Thomas Hobbes who believed that humans are inherently flawed and see violence as natural act. But Hobbes argued that society has a way of repressing that natural instinct. He explained that since humans have to live in community, then community can make rules that stultify the path to natural aggression. Hobbes called such mechanism, the “social contract.”

Hobbes wrote in the 18th century and so he did not have access to the volumes of facts on evolutionary biology that Koestler did, so there was no mention of evolutionary biology in Hobbes’ book. Koestler on the other hand no doubt drew on the findings of evolutionary biology. But Hobbes still has the distinction of being the first modern philosopher to argue that humans will never be peaceful souls.

Sigmund Freud never mentioned Hobbes in his superlative philosophising on the human mind but one wonders if Hobbes did not have an influence on the way Freud saw the natural faults of Homo Sapiens and what could be done to suppress those congenital psychological defects. Freud’s genius lies in the designs he invented to dissolve the inherent genetic weaknesses of the natural, violent propensities of Homo Sapiens.

In so doing, so you see shades of Hobbes but Freud never ever mentioned Hobbes. Freud arrived at the same gateway as Hobbes. They both invented programmes from within civilised living to curtail and extirpate the natural deficiencies in the human mind.

Koestler of course read both Hobbes and Freud but he differed fundamentally with them on how Homo Sapiens can be saved. He believed they could not be saved. He believed so because he knew he couldn’t control his own prediction for violence. Koestler was a serial rapist and one of his victims was the wife of one of the most left wing leaders British politics produced, Labour Party leader, Michael Foot. Koestler committed suicide in later years.

One of the world’s great evolutionary biologists, Harvard Professor E.O. Wilson took Koestler’s theory to its logical climax. Wilson argued that one of the genetic traits of Homo Sapiens in xenophobia. When American students demonstrated against Wilson and threatened to harm him, Wilson said all he did was to discover a scientific fact that society cannot wish away.

In my teaching of Koestler and Wilson, the innate violence of Homo Sapiens was always presented to students. I always dissect the two worst aspects of the flaws of Homo Sapiens in the history of civilization –slavery and the Holocaust. Every year, in class, I showed the film, “Schindler’s List” about the Holocaust and asked students to pay special attention to a particular scene.
The maid of the sadistic Nazi commander of the death camp was a Jewish woman. One night, he felt the need for sex and pulled the maid close to him, then, in a fit of rage, he threw her violently against the wall with the exclamation that she was naturally dirty because she was a Jew. That scene graphically showed that the Nazis did not consider the Jews to be humans.

The Nazi regime considered Jews to be below normal people and committed genocide against them. Were Koestler and Wilson right? Important global leaders are describing what the Israeli government and army are doing in Gaza as genocide. They include top United Nation experts, and the President of Brazil. One director of the UN Human Rights Commission resigned categorising Israeli mass murder in Gaza as genocide.

It is possible in human society for the victims of xenophobia and genocide to become perpetrators of genocide themselves? One senior army official has called the Palestinian people human animals. But isn’t this the way Nazi Germany saw the Jews, and tragically murdered six million of them, a crime we must never forget?

As someone trained in philosophy and who has studied the Holocaust and taught it at the university level, (my first essay as a UG freshman in 1974 in the philosophy class of Sister Mary Noel Menezes was on the Holocaust), I would say Israeli destruction in Gaza constitutes genocide. If were to teach philosophy again, I would tell my students that the Jews who were victims in the Holocaust are now performing another Holocaust; this time against the Palestinian people.